


Barcode

by ameliacareful



Series: Massa Carnis [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Non-binary character, Slow Burn, mention of past drug use, non-neurotypical OC, past sex work as a minor, slave AU, slave!sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-03 23:45:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13352025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/pseuds/ameliacareful
Summary: Sam and Dean go undercover on a slave breeding ranch.  Both learn things.This work is complete and will be updated daily.





	1. One

            They are in Louisiana, pretending they are both slaves.

            Dean does not look or act like a slave. Sam can’t exactly explaine what a slave looks like but he can explain how one acts. Dean doesn’t act like that. He sprawls in the back of the van, staring out the window. The van’s driver keeps glancing in the rearview mirror and it’s making Sam nervous. Maybe, Sam tells himself, it’s just the way that Dean attracts attention pretty much everywhere he goes. But Dean is over six feet tall and everything about him—his attitude, his easy strength, his white maleness—says trouble. Sam is lucky he isn’t working at a factory or on a farm. Two big guys is just asking for problems.

            Sam’s eyes keep going from the back of the driver’s head to the back of Dean’s hand with it’s temporary barcode tattoo.

            “This Lily chick,” Dean says quietly.

            Sam shakes his head even as the driver said, “No talking!”

            Dean looks irritated.

            This was all a very bad idea, Sam thinks.

            They are headed to a stock farm in Louisiana, Madison Parish. Outside it’s flat and green. The weather is mild, which is nice. Sam likes the cold but he grew up in a warm place—a breeder ranch just outside of El Paso—and winter is a fairly new experience. It’s been great seeing snow but normal weather is a nice change. This part of Louisiana is poor even by the standards of the state. His old boss in the massage parlor used to say Louisiana was a third world country that happened to be located in the US.

            He doesn’t look at Dean, not encouraging him to talk. When he finally glances over, Dean has fallen asleep, head against the glass.

 

#

 

            The ‘farm’ is a house, three bedroom ranch kind of house, and behind it, a couple of long, ramshackle buildings that could almost be cheap motels. Or chicken sheds. There are doors, mostly open in the mid-day. Children playing in a dirt yard, chasing each other around shrieking. Everybody stops to watch the van pull up. The driver honks.

            “Eyes down,” Sam whispers as they get out.

            It’s hard to keep his eyes on the ground. The driver comes around and says, “I’m not gonna shackle you boys unless you give me cause.”

            “Yessir,” Sam says and Dean choruses a beat late.

            Inside they are met by a little guy with thinning hair. He’s wearing a white polo shirt with a thread hanging off the collar.

            “Len,” says the driver. “Got your delivery.” Len signs the tablet. It’s got a FedEx logo. Sam didn’t realize they were being delivered by FedEx. The van doesn’t have a logo on it. “What the hell do you want these guys for?” the driver asks.

            “Breeding,” Len says.

            “They’re big,” the driver says.

            “Yeah, but look at them,” Len says. He gets up and grabs Sam’s jaw, turns his head to show the driver his face. “Look at those cheekbones. And the eyes. If I can get those eyes to breed true, I’ll be able to sell girls for big bucks.”

            Sam keeps his face blank. Dean has a bit of a weird expression but remembers to drop his eyes.

            “Your funeral,” the driver says.

            “Any problems?”

            “No,” the driver says. The front door of the ranch house/office is a screen door and it thwacks behind the driver when he leaves.

            “You’re Sam,” Len says.

            “Yessir,” Sam says.

            “So you must be the hunter,” Len says to Dean and holds his hand out to shake. “Dean, right?”

            “Yeah,” Dean says. “Sam is my brother.”

            Len frowns. “His papers say he’s not FS.” When Dean doesn’t seem to understand he clarifies. “No felony. He’s bred, right?”

            Sam studies his sneakers and wishes they could skip this.

            “Sam was six months old when my mom died and my dad put him in foster care,” Dean says. “We don’t know how he ended up a slave.”

            Len looks at Sam.

            “I grew up on a stock ranch in Lanark,” Sam says quietly. “That’s all I remember.”

            “Lanark,” Len says. “Who owns that place?” He’s looking at Dean who of course hasn’t a clue.

            “Master Stu Fikini,” Sam says quietly.

            “What?” Len says.

            “Stu Fikini,” Sam says, louder.

            “Oh yeah! Arab guy, right?”

            “Libyan, I think,” Sam says. He’d rarely seen Master Fikini. They mostly saw the managers who ran the day to day stuff. A constant churn of people.

            “Yeah, old times and all that,” Dean says. “So, tell me what’s going on.”

            Len shuffles stuff around on his desk. “I don’t know what to make of this shit. Lily told me about Sam and the guys, the, what you call yourselves, hunters, and I called the guy in Louisiana.” Len shakes his head. “The guy at the massage parlor? He’s a piece of work, I’ll tell you. He gave me the number of these two guys, Roy and somebody?”

            “Walt and Roy,” Dean says. “Yeah.”

            “But Roy, apparently he’s laid up with a cracked pelvis or some shit,” Len says. “So he gave me some guy’s number.”

            “My dad,” Dean says.

            “Yeah, and he didn’t answer—”

            “I know, his message says to call me,” Dean says, impatient. So we’re here and we’ll figure out what is attacking your,” he waves his hand, “your herd.”

            Dean doesn’t like the word ‘slave’.

            “Stock,” Len supplies.

            “Whatever,” Dean says.

            “Your brother really does have great bone structure. He’s big and there isn’t a huge market for big white guys,” Len says. “But I bet any girls I got out of him would be pretty. If you want to stud him out while you’re here—”

            Dean is in the guy’s face so fast it makes Sam flinch. “Maybe you didn’t hear when I mentioned Sam was my _brother_ ,” Dean says, his voice so low it’s scary. “If he wants to fuck someone he’s welcome to do it but he is not for sale in any way. You will treat him in private like a free man, do you understand?”

            Len steps back. “I didn’t mean anything,” he says.

            “Dean,” Sam says and Dean glares at him but after a moment he must see something that makes him soften.

            “So what happened?” Dean asks.

            “Some guy snuck in and beat up one of my girls. I’d just call the police but this thing has been making the rounds. He’s been at a place in Union Church in Mississippi. Killed four girls and nobody could find him. No fingerprints, nothing. He attacked a couple of other girls and they said they saw him touch shit but the fingerprints belong to a dead slave. I mean, dead for a decade dead. Nobody believes it.”

            Dean nods. “You figure he’s gonna come back. Okay, we’ll see what we can do to stop him.”

            I’m sorry about making you pretend to be stock,” Len says. “But I can’t have freemen on the place. I don’t have a license for hospitality work. I had inspectors out yesterday when they got wind what happened making sure I’m not running an illegal brothel. They’ll be back once they hear about you.”

            “It’s just a couple of days. It’s not going to kill me.”

            “Look,” Len says. “I’m sorry, I have to put you both through a regular intake. Otherwise the stock will think you’re getting privileges and they’ll ask questions.”

            “Sure,” Dean says.

            “I, ah, I’m gonna hand you over to HD,” Len says. He watches Dean uncomfortably. “She’ll get you settled. HD!”

            Hell of a euphemism, Sam thinks. Intake. Settled.

            A woman comes to the back door. HD is dressed, like the rest of the stock, in a pair of gray sweatpants and a loose cotton tunic. She has a kind of no nonsense air about her that makes Sam think he likes her pretty much instantly.

            They follow her into what was originally the garage of the house. There’s a drain in the middle of the floor and a hose hooked up to a tank. “You know the drill,” she says.

            “Ah,” Sam swallows, “my brother doesn’t.”

            She looks a little surprised.

            “He was owned by a guy whose wife and kid died,” Sam improvises. “So he was treated like a free person most of the time. This is the first time he’s been sold since he was really young.”

            “Oh, wow,” HD says. “What happened that got you sent to this dump?”

            “Bankruptcy,” Dean says.

            Sam is glad Dean rolled with it.

            “Well that sucks.” She checks the tank which is about the size of a hot water heater. Sam kicks off his sneakers and pulls his shirt over his head. The concrete is really cold under his bare feet.

            “You’re gonna have to strip,” HD says to Dean. “What’s your name?”

            “He’s Dean, I’m Sam.”

            “Is he really your brother?”

            Sam nods.

            “That’s a first.”

            Dean is watching Sam strip and looking bemused.

            HD gestures with the hose nozzle. “Antibacterial shit. Keep your eyes closed,” she says. “It burns like a mother.”

            Sam stands barefoot and naked over the drain, arms out, and closes his eyes. The antibacterial stuff is cold and he feels his balls tighten. He scrunches his mouth tight. The stuff smells harsh, industrial. He got it in his eyes once and it hurt for a couple of days. He hates it, of course. He doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t.

            “Jesus!” Dean says when the spray hits his chest and abdomen. He must get some in his mouth because he spits and gags.

            HD cuts off the spray. “Don’t get it in your mouth,” she says.

            Goosebumps stand out on Dean’s arms. He spits again and then straightens. He closes his eyes. “Okay.”

            It’s so wrong to see Dean treated this way. He hates the stuff in his own hair but to see the milky liquid sprayed on Dean… Sam has to look away.

            When HD shuts off the spray, Sam gestures to a little white plastic stool, grimy with age. “You first,” he says to Dean. “Your hair is shorter.”

            “What are you doing?” Dean asks.

            “Checking for nits,” HD says. “If the kids get them it’s a pain in the ass.”

            “Lice? I don’t have lice!”

            “Dean,” Sam says, trying to remind him he’s supposed to be a slave. Sam can feel his face heat. It’s all wrong. Dean should not be subjected to this.

            “This feels like a concentration camp,” Dean says but he sits. HD parts his hair with a comb and goes through it carefully. Louisiana is warm compared to, say, Minnesota, but it isn’t actually all that warm when you’re standing around wet and naked. HD is thorough, though. Protecting her women and children, Sam figures.

            “Okay,” she says finally, “there’s a shower through there. Put on sweatpants and a shirt and take two changes of clothing out of the closet. There’s scuffs in there, too. But I don’t know if we have pairs big enough for you. It’s almost all women here. Don’t skip underwear.”

            Dean reaches for his jeans and shirt.

            “Nope,” HD says. “No clothes except the ones you get issued.”

            “Why?” Dean says.

            “So they can tell the stock from the staff,” Sam says.

            “What is this, San Quentin?” But Dean leaves his clothes.

            “He’s gonna get the snot taken out of him if he isn’t careful,” HD says, watching Dean pad away. She and Sam quietly appreciate Dean’s ass for a moment. Then Sam sits down and shivers while she goes through his hair. “You used to work with Lily, right?”

            “Yeah,” Sam says.

            “You’re gonna do something about whatever it is that attacked Denise.”

            “Word gets around,” Sam says. The stock isn’t supposed to know why they’re here.

            He can feel HD shrug.

            “He’s really your brother?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Lily said you’re stock but he’s like a ghost hunter or something.”

            Sam laughed. “Len thinks nobody knows.”

            “Len’s a little thick,” HD says. Not surprisingly, everybody knows. Stock often knows things that owners think they don’t. “Place is all right, though. He could be worse.”

            “You grew up here?”

            She shakes her head. “Nah. I used to work in a house in Vegas but they rarely keep a girl older than twenty-five. I’ve got a little one now. My bean. She’s eight months old.”

            “I grew up in Lanark.”

            “Nice place?”

            “Okay,” Sam says. “Not as nice as this. But run pretty loose.”

            “Okay,” HD says. “You’re clean. Go get a hot shower. You smell like insecticide.”

 

#

 

            How Dean can manage to make a shapeless cotton polyester tunic and gray sweatpants look good is beyond Sam but he does. The sweatpants reveal his ass and the shirt shows off his arms and shoulders. Sam can’t find tunics that really fit him. Everything is a little too tight. Scuffs are plastic sandals and of course none of them fit. It’s okay, he’s gone barefoot before and when he’s not on concrete it’s not too cold.

            HD takes them to show them where they will sleep. As they are crossing the yard, a girl runs up to Sam. She’s barely five feet tall. She’s tiny in every way except her eyes, which are huge. She’s black, with tight short hair. Lily is beautiful and Dean gets the smile he gets for pretty waitresses.

            “Sam!” she says.

            “Hi Lily,” Sam says.

            “Could you get me pregnant?”

            “No,” Sam said.

            Lily turns to Dean. “Can you get me pregnant? You’re pretty. If I don’t get pregnant they might send me to a factory.”

            Dean has lost his smile.

            Sam cuts in, “Lily, Len has to decide that.”

            Lily frowns. “But if I got pregnant then it would be okay. I haven’t gotten pregnant, Sam. I need to get pregnant. I don’t want to because I don’t want to have a baby because it will be gross and it will hurt. But I don’t want to go to the factory.”

            “I don’t want you to go to a factory,” Sam says. Lily has always been like this. She talks without seeming to realize what’s going on with the other people around her. There’s no real conversation, Lily just launches.

            “Do you have any weed?” she asks.

            “No,” Sam says.

            “You wouldn’t tell me if you did,” Lily says, frowning at him.

            Sam smiles. “You stole my stuff.”

            “I needed it,” she says. “I’m going to ask Len if you can get me pregnant. You’re nice, Sam. You won’t squeeze my tits.”

            “I’ll ask Len for you,” HD says.

            “Thanks HD,” Lily says and lets them walk on.

            “What…that’s Lily?” Dean says.

            HD shrugs. “I think she’s on the autism spectrum.”

            “Don’t squeeze her tits,” Sam says. “She hates it. She screeches.”

            HD leads them to a building about the size of a trailer but it’s concrete block and it has three doors. She takes them to the door at the far end, a cheap thing that looks like an indoor door. Flimsy except for the heavy padlock and hasp. She opens the door and inside is a concrete room with two pallets on the floor and cheap sheets neatly folded. There are a couple of high, marrow windows, barred. “Lock down is 9:00pm,” she says.

            “Lock down?” Dean says.

            “Can’t have a couple of unneutered males wandering around,” HD says. “This is the stud block. You’re the only guys here. Len usually prefers artificial insemination.”

            Dean’s face says, _you are fucking kidding me._

            It’s clean. It looks really solid—no holes for wind and rain to come through. Although it is probably a hellhole in summer.

            “I’m gonna bring you a couple of water bottles,” she says. “Latrine is in back. You need a pisspot?”

            “Yeah,” Sam says. “Just in case.”

            Dean watches her walk away. “I’ve seen better furnished jail cells,” he says. “Hell, prison cells have toilets.”

            Sam doesn’t know what to say. He tried to make it clear to Dean what being a slave would be like.

            “We’ll have to talk to Len about being locked in. That’s not gonna work,” Dean says. “Was it like this when you were growing up?”

            “I wasn’t breeding, I was a kid,” Sam says.

            “So you lived in like a dorm or barracks or something?”

            “I lived in a horse stall,” Sam says. “But Sasha fixed it up. Built walls to the ceiling and papered it with pictures from magazines, plugged all the holes where the wind came through. It was nice.”

            Dean gives him a look that indicates it does not sound nice. But it was. Master Fikini built a place for stock eventually but Sasha refused to move. They liked the stall. It smelled of wood in the summer and rarely got too hot. They had two beds, real beds, a little table and a little bookshelf where Sasha kept bowls and cups and a couple of books. Slaves weren’t usually taught to read but Sasha was a felon so they could already read and they taught Sam.

            Outside the kids are playing and it reminds Sam of growing up. He shakes out the sheets and folds the bottom flat sheet as tightly as he can around the pallet. Dean shakes out the sheet on the other pallet.

            “I’ll get it,” Sam says.

            Dean winks at him. “You’re not my slave, Sam. I should make your bed.”

            “No!” Sam blurts out.

            Sam’s reaction makes Dean laugh. “Oh, man. It is so on. I’m gonna be your slave.”

            “You—”

            “I’m gonna fetch and carry. Imma wash your clothes, Sammy.”

            Sam doesn’t know what to do. Dean is kidding. He knows it. But the idea of having Dean wash his underwear is…an inversion of the moral universe or something. Embarrassing. Wrong.

            Dean lunges for the sheets on the pallet and Sam unthinking tries to get there first. They end up trying to wrestle the sheets out of each others hands. Dean tries to hipcheck Sam and Sam knows he should give up. This is what Dean wants. But Dean is laughing. Sam tries to twist things out of Dean’s grasp. Dean gives up only to tackle Sam onto the bed.   He throws Sam into some kind of wrestling hold but he’s still laughing and Sam escapes and before he realizes what he’s done he’s put his hand on Dean’s face to try to get past him.

            Dean mock growls and Sam realizes _he’s_ laughing, too. He goes for broke, really trying now to get the sheets. They are still wrestling around on the bed when Sam realizes HD is standing in the doorway with a couple of bottles of water.

            He freezes.

            Dean rolls on his back, grinning.

            HD rolls her eyes. “Brothers,” she says. Evidently this convinces her that they are. “Here’s water. You can refill the bottles at the tap.”

            She leaves them.

 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean meets the stock and starts to figure out what they might be hunting. Lily's situation becomes more clear.
> 
> * * *

            Strangers are always a big deal but Dean is fascinating to just about everybody on the stock on the farm. They finish making their beds and there are three kids standing in their open doorway, watching them.

            “Hi,” Dean says.

            The youngest is maybe three. She checks with the other two to make sure it’s all right. The tallest, a boy about seven, says, “Hi.”

            The little girl says, “Hi,” too.

            “You should only get water from the tap,” the boy says. “If you get it from the pond you’ll puke.”

            Dean nods, serious as a church. “Good to know,” he says.

            “What color would it be?” The boy who asks is only a little younger, maybe a year.

            “Depends on what he ate last,” the older boy says. “Chow colored, probably.”

            “Or dandelion greens color.”

            “There aren’t any dandelions in the winter,” says the oldest boy.

            “Wanna see?” Dean pretends he’s going to put his finger down his throat.

            The kids scream in terror and delight and take off. Dean grins at Sam.

            Of course Dean is great with kids. Sam doesn’t know how he feels about kids. He’s afraid he’ll say or do the wrong thing. Maybe screw things up.

            “Check out the sights?” Dean asks, cocking a thumb at the yard. They find the latrine and the tap. There are twenty-two women and god knows how many kids. The kids don’t stand still much. There are seventeen acres but they’re supposed to stay in the area near the buildings. It’s surrounded by four foot fence that they could hop over. Security isn’t tight. It’s not the fence that keeps everyone here, it’s the consequences of running.

            HD introduces them to Denise. Denise has one eye swollen shut and an arm in a makeshift sling.

            “Hey,” Dean says.

            Denise doesn’t say anything, just looks at him. Denise is probably pretty when her face isn’t swollen. One of the other women takes her one year old from her.

“Hey Timtim,” says the other woman to the baby. He reaches for Denise.

            “He doesn’t understand why I won’t pick him up,” Denise says apologetically.

            Dean nods. “So what happened?”

            “It…it looked like Rick,” she says.

            “Rick?” Dean asks.

            “My boyfriend. From before.”

            “Before what?” Dean asks.

            “Before she was a slave,” Sam says. Another tell that Dean is not stock. For felons, there was before and there was now. To distract her and all the other listeners he continues. “You say it _looked like_ Rick?” She looks so hurt. Not just the beating but somewhere inside.

            “Yeah,” Denise says, the word almost a sigh. “But he was acting weird. I thought he was drunk or something. I mean, Rick can be sarcastic but he’s not mean for no reason, you know? I couldn’t figure out what he was doing here. I kept saying that he had to get out of here before we both got in trouble.”

            People sometimes tried to find friends and family who were stock but it was always a bad idea. A man came for Sasha once, Sasha’s American cousin. Sasha watched him through the fence when they turned him away. “He’s a good man, my cousin,” Sasha said.

            No one ever came for Sam but that was all right because if someone came and tried to see you, you got punished. It was to discourage people from trying to get in touch. Sasha had gotten three strikes with a cane. Not much really but the master had seen them looking through the fence and that they didn’t try to communicate with their cousin so it wasn’t so bad. Sam wondered, not for the first time, if Sasha had tried to get to their cousin in Illinois when they ran away.

            “I mean, it was Rick,” Denise says. “Stupid baseball cap and everything.”

            “Did you smell anything weird, like sulfur? Was it unusually cold?” Dean asks.

            Denise thinks. “I don’t remember it that well,” she admits. “He hit my head a lot and later on a threw up and I think I’ve got a concussion. I don’t remember smelling anything. It wasn’t cold, I know that. It was pretty warm that night. Remember? Sadhika’s little Dougie wanted to know if there would be lightning bugs. Or maybe that was before?”

            “It was warm that night,” HD says.

            “What about his eyes?” Dean asks.

            Denise shrugs. “You mean were they bloodshot or anything? He didn’t act stoned or nothing. He acted all normal and just wanted a conjugal visit. He kept saying that. Soooo Rick. Like it’s better to call it a ‘conjugal visit’ then to say you want sex.”

            “And then?” Dean says, his voice gentle.

            “I kept telling him to get out of here before they found him. I kept telling him, ‘that girl is dead, that girl you knew, Denise, is dead.’” She tears up. “So he started hitting me. You know, Rick could be a lying piece of shit but he never hit me, okay? He didn’t act like himself, neither. He knocked me down and he hit me on the face and then he fucked me and left.”

            A couple of the women heard the commotion and they saw Rick leaving. They all describe the same thing. A guy in a baseball cap and a t-shirt, jumping the fence and taking off.

            One of the people who saw him is Lily.

            “What did he look like?” Sam asks her.

            “He was skinny,” Lily says. She thinks a moment. “He looked like anybody.”

            “Yeah?” Sam says, hoping she’ll go on.

            “No,” Lily says, insistent, “like _anybody_.”

            Sam nods. He doesn’t get what she’s talking about.

            Lily sighs. “You don’t understand. He didn’t run like he looked. He was a good runner. He walked like one person and ran like a different person. I don’t know how to tell you.” Her face scrunches in anger. “I’m using my words, fucker. You should understand.”

            “I’m sorry,” Sam says, hoping to control what he sees coming.

            But she’s already wound up, probably by him and Dean showing up. Lily likes things to be the same. Clients come for appointments. Her flipflops have to be by her door and they have to be red. Sam remembers. A new pair of yellow flipflops made her lose her shit. Now it’s all built up she can’t hold it in and she flings herself at him, fists hitting his chest.

            HD starts forward but Sam says, “I got her.” He turns her around so her back is to him and wraps his arms around her and lets her screech. “S’okay,” Sam says to her. “Let it all out, Lily.”

            “Fuck! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! YOU STILL SMELL LIKE BUG JUICE!” Bug juice is the antiseptic spray HD used. Lily screams in rage and bursts into tears. She’s a tiny, angry little bundle swinging her fists in the air but she doesn’t try to kick him which he considers a good thing.

            When she is finally sobbing quietly, Sam says again, “Sorry, Lily.”

            He lets her go and she marches away from them, fists clenched.

            “She can’t go to a factory,” HD says. “She won’t be able to handle it.”

            They’ll kill her. Work her to death or she’ll have an accident or they’ll break her, let the stock have her.

            “What happened to Rick?” Denise asks. “I mean, did somebody do something to him? Was it like PCP or meth rage? He didn’t act like that. I never seen him on meth but I’ve seen him drunk and stoned and I even saw him when he took some of my vicodin but he never talked in that voice.” She looks at Dean, “I mean, I don’t do that stuff or nothing, okay? I had my wisdom teeth taken out and they had to like cut through my jaw and stuff.”

            Dean nods as if he cares if Denise got the drugs legally. Sam is getting a pretty good sense of what Dean thinks is right and wrong and he’s pretty sure Dean doesn’t give a rat’s ass about vicodin.

            “They say it can’t be Ricky ‘cause they say he’s locked up in Clements in Texas. But he looked like Rick.”

            “What kind of voice?” Dean asks.

            “Like he was someone else,” she says. “I dunno. You know how you know someone’s voice?”

            “Did he sound like he was all sleazy? Or did he growl?” Dean asks.

            Denise looks surprised by the question. “Nothing like that. He just stopped talking like he normally does, all conjugal visits and talking about emancipation and shit, like he even knows what that is, and started talking in this different way about how at least I had a bunch of people for friends and how people liked me and I didn’t know how lucky I was. Rick was real proud of himself, you know? He thought he was really good in bed and he would always ask me if it was good. This was just wham bam thank you ma’am.”

            She keeps talking but after that it’s just repeating what she said before and worrying about what she can’t remember. About how Rick has a ton of friends or he did before although now he’s in prison.

            There’s a cluster of women and children around them by now. It’s the only thing going on. Everybody wants to talk about it. Dean says, “I need some water, be right back,” and jerks his head for Sam to follow.

            “A demon?” Sam asks quietly, thinking of Meg.

            “Possessed her boyfriend? Could be. Could be a lot of things. Probably not a siren.”

            “A siren?” Sam says.

            “A siren or an incubus. It sounds a little like one of them. They feed on emotional energy. There _are_ different kinds, maybe this one gets off on rape.”

            Sam opens his mouth to say it wasn’t rape but stops himself. It wasn’t rape because she’s stock and stock can’t technically be raped, but a monster would still like her emotions.

            “What now?” Sam asks.

            “We have HD tell Len we want to talk to him.”

 

#

 

            There are security camera on the front and back doors of the ranch house. “Slaves steal,” is all Len says by way of explanation. The camera on the back gets a view of some of the yard.

            Dean has Sam take them through the footage. This surprises Len. It surprises Sam a little, too, but Dean’s relationship with his computer is complicated. Sam is getting good at unfreezing it. He installed a virus checker because he found out online that was what was probably screwing up Dean’s computer.

“How’d you learn to use a computer?” Len asks Sam.

            “He taught me. I use it to help him on hunts,” Sam says.

            Len starts to say something but glances at Dean and apparently changes his mind.

            The footage from the night is pretty standard. Kids running in and out at the edge of the frame. Then darkness. The security light goes on a couple of times, Len explains that sometimes it catches movement when someone has to go to the latrine.

            It flicks on and someone crosses the edge of a circle of light. It’s a skinny white guy on the grainy video tape. He glances up at the camera and grins and gives it the finger. His eyes flash for an instant, some trick of the light. The he’s out of the circle of illumination.

            “Go back,” Dean says.

            Sam steps the video back. Skinny guy appears at the edge of the light, moves jerkily back, raises his finger looking up at the camera—

            “There,” Dean says and Sam freezes it at the moment when the light caught his eyes. “I’ve never seen something flare like that,” Dean says.

            Sam hasn’t either but he hasn’t spent a lot of time looking at video surveillance footage. He figures Dean knows what he’s talking about.


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Dean bicker about their childhoods. Because, you know, Sam and Dean. Bickering. It's what they do.
> 
> * * *

            Len personally ‘locks’ them up at nine. By midnight they are out with the EMF reader and Dean’s gun and knife (shipped to Len overnight before they came to the farm.) HD has found Sam a pair of scuffs. His heels hang off the back but it’s been years since he went barefoot a lot and his feet aren’t toughened up anymore. “You think it might be a ghost?” Sam asks quietly.

            Dean shakes his head. “But you can always get caught flatfooted, dude. Best to check.” There’s no action on the EMF.

            “So you grew up in a place like this? With that…what’s her name, Sasha?”

            “Yeah,” Sam says quietly. The ground is weedy and uneven. Sam is glad for his scuffs. It’s just a little chilly.

            Something is off in Dean’s tone. The question is meant to sound casual but it doesn’t.

            “I should have known,” Dean says. “Dad and me, we should have checked.”

            Sam doesn’t see how they could have but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. Dean is unpredictable when something is upsetting him.

            “Then they sent you to some kind of sex club? Was that when she died?”

            “No,” Sam says. They are moving away from the buildings. “When Sasha died I just stayed where I was. You can’t certify for hospitality until you’re fourteen.”

            “How do you certify?” Dean asked.

            “You get a bunch of medical checks and some shots,” Sam said.

            “Like, training? Do you get training?” Dean’s voice is so carefully neutral.

            What is going to set him off? “Training?” Sam asks.

            “Like, do they tell you about sex? Like sex education?”

            “I knew how sex worked by the time I was fourteen, Dean.” Sam can’t help it, it seems funny.

            “But, like, you hadn’t had sex, right?”

            “No,” Sam says. “I was kind of young for my age, you know? I mean, I was short until I was about sixteen. Girls weren’t exactly interested.”

            “So they just sold you. Like to some guy. For your first time.”

            Sam hadn’t thought about any of this in years. “They put me with a slave named Lee. He was older than me. He worked with me until I, you know, was used to it. He had graduated butt plugs. Little to big. He showed me how to…put my fingers in and stretch, how to prep and get clean. He told me how to act and stuff like that. It wasn’t bad. I mean, it wasn’t great but it was okay.”

            Girls sometimes got auctioned as virgins but Sam had never heard of it happening with guys. Maybe because it was hard to tell if a boy was a virgin. Although sometimes apparently it was hard to tell with a girl, too.

            “Did people…” Dean paused and Sam thought for a minute maybe he’d heard something. The guy coming. But Dean cleared his throat and asked, “Did anyone hurt you?”

            Some guys were morons who watched too much porn. They thought that shoving a couple of fingers up his ass was prep. But in some ways, the club had been easier than when he was supposed to take care of Mr. Tom. Mr. Tom expected him to talk to him but he was kind of boring. He had to be coaxed to use his walker. Mr. Tom would get angry, because of the Parkinson’s. It caused dementia. Like Alzheimers. Sometimes Mr. Tom got up at 3:00 in the morning and forgot to put on his pants. When he worked at the club he knew when he was working and when he wasn’t. During the day, at the club, he didn’t have to do anything. He had cared about Mr. Tom, he really had. He wondered about him, if the people taking care of him in the nursing home knew how much he liked 7-Up and Judge Judy, wondered if he had died. But he didn’t miss caretaking. He didn’t miss the 24/7 of it.

            But he can’t say that to Dean. “Sometimes the sex wasn’t great. Nobody raped me or beat me or anything like that,” Sam says. “It really wasn’t bad.”

            “Do you hear yourself!” Dean snapped. “You’ve been shafted. I mean literally fucked by the system. ‘Literally’, literally, not, you know, just ‘really really’.”

            A lot of people were weird about sex work, Sam knew that. But most of those people were johns. He can’t believe Dean was like that, Dean isn’t a john, Dean was DEAN. “Oh come on, Dean! How old were you when you started hunting?”

            They are close to the fence, out in the dark, so he can’t see Dean’s expression, exactly, but Dean stutter steps. “What?”

            “How old were you when you started? Sixteen?”

            “That doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Dean says.

            “Sixteen. Right?”

            There’s a moment while Dean doesn’t say anything and Sam pictures his expression. His jaw setting, the hardening of his eyes; Dean doesn’t like to be cornered, even verbally.

            “It was kind of gradual,” Dean finally says.

            Sam lets that hang.

            “Like, sometimes I’d wait in the car while dad did a salt and burn. It was just us, you know, it wasn’t like he could just leave me somewhere.”

            “So younger than sixteen.”

            “What’s your point, Matlock?”

            “Just that a guy who has been hanging around in cemeteries trying not to get killed by angry ghosts since he was twelve really doesn’t have a great argument about unsafe workplaces.”

            The silence goes on and on. The single lit window in the house is the only light other than a sliver of moon.

            Finally Dean says, “You can be a real bitch, you know that?”

            “Insults? You lose an argument and you fall back on insults? Jerk move.”

            “Bitch,” Dean says and Sam can hear the smirk.

            “Jerk,” Sam says back.

            “I like this side of you,” Dean says. “I’m finally getting the real Sam.”

            It washes over Sam. Oh God, Sam’s been treating Dean like…like…he’s a fellow slave.

            “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I don’t know maybe it’s because of the clothes or the barcode or I dunno, I’m just an idiot—”

            “Shut up,” Dean says easily. “I just said it’s good.”

            Sam shuts up. He can feel that he’s clenching his jaw and he swallows.

            “I think I was around seven when, you know, I used to wait in the car,” Dean says. “Bitch.”

            Sam can’t help it, he laughs. “Jerk.”

 

#

 

            They patrol that night, finally turning in around four. The next day a supply truck shows up and everybody forms a line, Dean unloading the truck the women passing the forty pound boxes one to another, and Sam in the storage shed, stacking them. Dean is chipper and energetic. Sam feels like he could sleep for a week but he tries to pretend he got more than three hours.

            The first day Sam was pleased to see that Len fed his stock the bars rather than the kibble. Stock bars were brown and chewy. Dean kept a couple of protein bars in the Impala and Sam had tried one of those. Stock bars were sort of like that.

            Dean LIKES the stock bars. Really. The man will eat anything as long as if doesn’t have a vegetable. Well, not counting onions, they’re probably the reason Dean doesn’t get scurvy. That and the tomato sauce on pizza. Sam has never had to think about diet and nutrition and shit before. He’s been looking up what he should be eating if he wants to get stronger, be more of an asset for Dean.

            The work is nice. It loosens up his muscles and gets him sweating, trying to make sure that everything is stacked neatly, new bars in the back of the long shed, older bars in front to use first. The manager this morning lets HD do all the work and she’s the one who helps Sam move all the old stuff to the front. Len didn’t like to feed expired stuff, she says.

            The shed is full when they’re done.   Sam refills his water bottle from the tap and heads back to their room. Dean is chattering to a couple of the women, including Denise, the woman who was beaten. She is laughing. Sam feels a warmth when he looks at Dean. A sense of _mine_. Which is a mistake but fuck it. He lays down on his pallet, thinking he’ll just take a minute…

            When they’re walking the place in the dark that night, he thinks maybe it was good he got a four hour nap.

            Seriously. Hunting sounds action packed and exciting. But it’s really like weeks of boredom punctuated by a few minutes of terror.

            Dean is so good at it. He never says that they should give it up for the night. He never loses his focus. He sometimes acts like he’s not really paying much attention but he always is. The stuff he knows. Like about the eyes flashing in the surveillance video and at a case they did before, where he put the blood stains together as a sigil. Sam is just the 6’4” grunt, hauling boxes and trying to keep up. He wishes he knew more.

            Dean told him that studying math is great but he might want to study some Latin. Sam finds all the grammar terms confusing. He didn’t even know what a noun or a verb was until he started studying Latin—maybe they teach people that stuff in school, he doesn’t know. _Sum Es Est Sumus Estis Sunt_. Dean can handle anything in a fight. Sam is pretty sure he’ll never be able to keep his cool like Dean. While he is trying not to shit himself, Dean is coming up with unexpected things to attack whatever monster they’re hunting. Sam has seen him grab an old standing lamp and disperse a ghost with it. _The old ones are more likely to have iron in them, Sammy. The new stuff is all plastic._

            “Sam?” someone calls quietly. It’s Lily.

            He worked with Lily in New Orleans in a massage parlor/brothel. She’s always been weird and a pain in the ass. He can’t say he likes her but, well, the way she is doesn’t seem like her fault.

            “You should go back in,” Dean says.

            “What are you doing?” Lily asks. “You’re supposed to be locked up.”

            “We’re looking for the guy who beat up Denise,” Sam says. Lily isn’t stupid so Sam got in the habit of just telling her the truth.

            “Will you have sex with me?” Lily asks.

            “I can’t,” Sam says.

            “Why not?”

            “Len has to decide,” Sam says.

            He can feel Dean looking at them in the dark. Does Dean think he’s crazy to turn down sex with Lily? Dean likes girls. Or does Dean disapprove of having sex with Lily because she’s a slave? Dean doesn’t like it when he has sex with johns and isn’t haven’t sex with him since that one, wonderful night. But he and Lily wouldn’t exchange any money. It doesn’t matter what is on Dean’s mind, Sam doesn’t want to have sex with Lily although he would if Dean said to. But he knows Dean isn’t going to say to.

            “Len doesn’t have to know,” Lily says. It could have been said as a come on, but Lily just offers it, plain. “Come on, Sam, I don’t want to go to a factory. People who go to a factory get used up.”

            “What’s she talking about?” Dean asks.

            “It’s a breeder farm,” Lily says like Dean is stupid. “If I don’t breed I’m not worth keeping.”

            “People don’t last long at the factories,” Sam explains. “People get sick. They get hurt. Stuff like that.”

            “Will you have sex with me?” Lily asks Dean.

            Dean is saved from answering by movement in the darkness.

            It’s HD. “Lily, you can’t be out.”

            Lily doesn’t answer but she does turn and walk dejectedly back towards the quarters.

            HD stands, sturdy in the night, arms crossed. “Anything?” she asks.

            “Not yet,” Dean says.

            “Are you going to have sex with her?” HD asks.

            “No,” Sam says.

            HD scuffs in the grass.

            “I mean, she’s crazy, you know? I…do you need me to?”

            HD sighs.

            “Has she been having sex?” Dean asks. “Why isn’t she pregnant?”

            “Len uses artificial insemination,” HD explains. “Sometimes people have trouble getting preggers from it.”

            “Or maybe she just can’t,” Dean said. “What’s gonna happen to her?”

            “If she doesn’t get pregnant? Len’ll probably sell her,” HD says. “She’s pretty but she’s not exactly pet material. Len doesn’t have sex with the stock anyway.”

            “How come?” Sam asks.

            “He’s married,” HD says. “I guess that’s what he wants.”

            “Can’t he sell her back to someone in New Orleans? Hospitality work?”

            “She lost her license. She freaked on some guy.”

            Sam gets it. They all expected it to happen. Most of the time Lily would let the guys do what they wanted but once in awhile something set her off and then, that time, when a guy touched her breasts she’d melt down. They’d all known some day someone was going to file a complaint.

            “I’ll fuck her if it means she has a chance of not ending up at some place where she’ll die,” Dean says.

            “You’re a free man,” HD says. “The child wouldn’t be a slave. A child is only a slave if both parents are slaves.”

            “So don’t tell anyone. Sam’s parents were both free and that didn’t stop anything.”

            “Dean, you’d never know if she had a child. Or what happened to the kid,” Sam says. It would drive Dean nuts to think he might have a child stuck in this.

            “Your parents were free?” HD says. “I thought you were bred.”

            “My dad put me in the foster system when I was a baby.”

            “Somebody fucked up,” Dean says. “We’re gonna get him out. We’re working with a lawyer, I just gotta make us some money.”

            They’re all standing in the dark.

            “So, you live here the rest of your life, raising your kids?” Dean asks.

            “Until we stop having them. Then once the youngest kids are ten or twelve, they sell us off as grade labor. Factory or agriculture.” HD takes a breath. “But there are a lot of people who are against slavery. In a decade, I think it will be illegal.”

            Sam has heard talk about slavery becoming illegal all his life. He doesn’t believe it. But he doesn’t say anything to HD.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, Gertiecraign, for catching my typos!


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A break in the case. Sam and Dean view another stock farm.
> 
> * * *

            The next morning, Len has them brought to his office. “I got a call from a guy I know in Mississippi. One of his girls was killed last night and another girl says one guy walked in but a different guy walked out. Think it could be the same thing?”

            “How far away?” Dean asks.

            “Less than an hour.”

            “Can you get us there?”

            Sam wants Len to say it’s not possible but Len picks up his phone. “Hey, Wright. I got my guys here and they want to check your place, see if it’s the same thing.”

            …

            “Nah, I can bring them over and you can claim you’re considering using them stud.”

            …

            “Yeah, see you.” Len hangs up, rubs his mouth. “Give me twenty and we’ll head over.”

 

#

 

            Dean is antsy, ready. He asks if they can wear their regular clothes, ‘civvies’ he says. Len says no. Of course they can’t, their cover is that they’re breeding stock. Sam thinks it would have been better if they just came as themselves; Dean as a hunter and Sam as Sam.

            Len drives an old, tan Volvo and Dean plops down in the back seat. Sam hesitates and Len says, “Seat’s fine, Sam. There’s no room in the footwells for a couple of big guys like you, anyway.”

            Dean’s head snaps up. “I told you,” he says, voice completely level, “Sam is my brother, you treat him like a free man.”

            Len glances in the rear view mirror. “I got an email that I’ve got inspectors coming tomorrow or the next day just because you guys are here. If they find something irregular on the farm, they’ll fine me or shut me down. And two guys, one a slave and one not, roaming around looking for ghosts, that is not going to do me any favors. I shut down, you don’t get your $10k.”

            Dean is doing this for money. Sam hadn’t known that. He’d thought this was just a regular hunt. The cost of the lawyer is $10,000. Dean is doing this for him.  

            “I can get it somewhere else, and you can possibly lose a couple of girls, starting with when it comes back for Denise.” The thing has done that, come back and killed someone it attacked before.

            Len shakes his head. “Or maybe he won’t come back.”

            A pretty girl with breeding potential can easily cost $10,000. Sam would be lucky if he went for $2,000. More likely, $500 from a factory. But there aren’t as many women who are slaves and even fewer in their early twenties. Most slaves are men. Just the way the criminal justice system works.

            Sam keeps his eyes down. He is not worth this. He doesn’t want to go to a factory, doesn’t want to be stuck in some hazardous dump where free people can’t work, freezing in the winter, baking in the summer, fed too little and fighting with felon slaves just to survive another day. But he doesn’t know how he can make this up to Dean. Dean doesn’t understand that there is something…unclean about Sam. That he deserves to be stock.

            Now Len turns on, of all things, NPR.

            “How’d you get into this business?” Dean asks.

            “Worked for an industrial plant just outside Biloxi,” Len says. “We used stock labor. We did a bunch of things, plating, stuff like that. I was in purchasing and I hated the place. Management was awful, there was always cost-cutting and it drove me nuts. So I started trading in stock. I’ve got a decent eye for what the market likes, you know?”

            Dean’s eyebrows go up a little and he nods like that makes sense but Sam doesn’t like the simmering anger he can feel coming off of Dean.

            “You don’t sound like someone from Mississippi.”

            “Southern Jew,” Len says. “I mean, my Dad is. My mom is protestant. I went to school in Colorado. Dad doesn’t exactly approve of my line of work. We don’t talk anymore. But slaves are lucky when I buy them. I don’t buy for factories anymore. I buy a slave and I just doubled its lifespan, you know?”

            “You’re a real mensch,” Dean says.

            Len looks into the rearview again and Sam can see from his eyes that he’s smiling. “Yeah, well…”

            Dean smiles back and it’s cold.

            Sam looks out the window.

            If it wasn’t for the sign, of course, he’d never know when they crossed the state line. They turn off the highway onto a gravel road and the tires crunch and spit a little gravel. The Volvo bounces on old shocks, hitting wash outs. They go for about ten minutes through a sparse trees. Dean rolls down the window and it’s a little chilly but smells of countryside.

            Len looks as if he’d like to tell Dean to roll up the window but thinks the better of it.

            They pass a white sign with “KaleBar Stock Est. 1987” in blue letters. Then there’s a tall double fence and a gate. Old school. When they started places like this they fenced them in tight but nobody does that much anymore. Len stops at the gate and honks and dogs start barking. Through the gate there are a motley assemblage of buildings: an old farm house, a bunch of old mobile homes, a barn. It looks run down. Weeds everywhere. There are clotheslines strung with dingy sweatpants and loose cotton tops.

            Dean glances at Sam, appalled. This looks a lot like the place where Sam grew up so he isn’t sure what Dean is appalled about. A big guy comes out of the house and climbs on a motor bike. He rides the thousand feet or so to the gate, parks the bike, and unlocks the latch and pulls it back.

            That’s different. Sam doesn’t know many places where they have to lock up. The way to keep slaves from running isn’t to run the place like a prison, it’s to make running such a horrific idea that people just don’t do it. He’s getting a bad vibe. There are no kids running around playing. No women chatting in the yards between the trailers.

            Len pulls the Volvo into the grass.

            The guy with the motorbike is big with long thin hair. Not fat, not particularly fit, either, but he’s taller than Sam. Len introduces them, “Kaylen, this is Dean and Sam. This is Kaylen Wright, boys.”

            “Damn they’re big,” Wright says.

            “Dean’s not a slave. I told you. Sam’s his brother.”

            “Damn, surprised you ain’t on a farm somewhere, pulling a tractor or something.” Wright wheezes a bit when he laughs.

            Sam pretends to smile. “Yessir.”

            Dean smiles.

            Sam feels a shiver up his spine. Dean’s smile is not pretty.

            There’s a girl standing on the sagging porch of the old white farmhouse. She’s wearing sweatpants and a cotton top and is barefoot. She has a crewcut. Wright sees Sam looking and turns around. “Rini,” he yells, “get back in the house! Make some coffee!”

            The girl turns and disappears inside.

            “Rini cleans and cooks,” he explains.

            “Does that make her a house slave?” Dean asks.

            Len looks uncomfortable but Wright doesn’t catch the cut in Dean’s voice.

            “Yeah, I guess it does,” Wright says. “Come on up. You want coffee?”

            “Nah,” Len says. “I drink more than a cup and I get jumpy.”

            “I’ll take a cup,” Dean says. “You want one, Sam?”

            Wright looks a little taken aback. Dean is supposed to be pretending to be a slave. The barcode is right there on the back of his hand. Slaves don’t get a cup of coffee.

            Sam would kill for a cup of coffee. But he looks at the ground.

            “Sam’ll take one, too,” Dean says, all charm.

            There’s a pause. Then, “All righty!” Wright says.

            Wright explains that sometimes his back gives him problem so he has to use the motorbike. Sam isn’t sure that makes any sense but he’s relieved to have a break in the tension when Wright putts back to the house and they follow on foot. Inside the house is dark. There’s a dining room with half the floor torn up and piles of wood, boxes and newspapers in it. The living room looks like it was furnished in the 70’s and never touched again. The go past the stairs down a narrow hall to the kitchen.

            The girl is standing at the coffee maker, head down. Her hair is dirty, as are her bare feet.

            “Get on out of here, Rini,” Wright says. “Imma talk some business.”

            Rini disappears out the back storm door without a word.

            “How you take your coffee, boys?”

            “Black for me,” Dean says, “cream and sugar for Sam.”

            “Milk okay?” Wright asks Dean.

            Sam’s afraid Dean is going to push it, ask Sam if milk is okay, but thankfully he just says, “Milk’s fine.”

            The table and chairs are Early American, also straight from the 60’s and 70’s. Dean sits down and Sam goes to sit on the floor next to him but Dean’s eyes stop him. Dean glances at the chair next to him and Sam knows what he’s saying, _sit in the chair_. It feels a little like spitting in church but Sam does it.

            Wright notices but doesn’t say anything.

            “So what’d your brother do?” he says to Dean.

            “Do?” Dean asks.

            “How’d he end up a slave? And how’d you find him? They don’t let family members own slaves.”

            “My mom died and Sam was put in foster care at six months. We don’t know how he went from there to being a slave. We’ve got a lawyer working on it.” Dean tastes his coffee. “This is good coffee.”

            “I like a little chicory in my coffee,” Wright says. “That’s quite a story.”

            “Story?” Dean’s eyebrows raise again.

            “About your brother here.”

            Dean nods. “So tell me what happened.”

            “I was asleep. It was about one, I heard all this ruckus, screaming and such. So I go outside and they tell me someone killed Carrie Pearl. She’s a good ‘un, four kids in four years, you know? Inna is all beat up and she tells me some story about one guy going into Carrie Pearl’s trailer and another one coming out. Honestly, I thought she was lying. But I got some of them security cameras like Len’s got so I look on them and sure enough. One guy came in the gate but a different guy went out.”

            “How’d he get in the gate?”

            “I ain’t locked it in years. But Len told me this guy comes back. So I’m keeping it locked.”

            “Can we see the footage?”

            Wright laughs. “Ain’t no ‘footage’. It’s a VCR tape.” But he hauls himself out of the chair and they go into the family room.

            It smells close and musty. There’s a old tube TV and a grimy recliner with the seat and back shaped like Wright.

            Wright slaps a tape in an old VCR. “I got it stopped at where the first guy comes in.”

            They watch the tape. The guy that comes in is the same guy that was in Len’s tape. Rick. Then Wright speeds up the tape and slows it just in time to see another guy, a guy with long gray hair in a braid, dressed in something like a slave cotton overshirt, but with a piece added so it is like a dress hanging almost to his knees. He stops and looks at the camera a moment. Wright stops the tape.

            Sam can’t help it, he says, “No—”

            Dean says, “What?”

            Sam shakes his head. But it is. “I…I don’t understand,” he says.

            “You know him?” Len says.

            “They’re dead,” Sam whispers.

            “Who is it,” Dean says.

            “Sasha. That’s Sasha. But Sasha is dead. I saw them.”


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam remembers Sasha. Dean figures out what is stalking the women.
> 
> * * *

            “Wait,” Dean says. “That’s Sasha?”

            “Sasha is dead,” Sam says and he can feel that he’s going to cry. He can remember the yard. He can remember the way they had Sasha tied and how Sasha wouldn’t look at him until they were flaying the skin off and Sasha was screaming and their eyes locked on Sam. Eight year old Sam. Sasha’s skin hanging off them in strips. Blood. It went on and on and Sam just stood there. He didn’t even try to stop it. Sasha screaming and staring at him with wild, blue eyes and Sam just standing there so scared and not doing a damned thing.

            But the person in the video looks like Sasha. The long braid, the way Sasha used to modify their clothes.

            “You said Sasha was your mom,” Dean says.

            “They were,” Sam whispers.

            “Shut it off,” Dean barks.

            Wright is frowning at Sam, confused.

            “Fucking—” Dean gets up and ejects the tape. He gives the tape to Len and says, “Look at me Sam. I don’t—that’s a guy.”

            Sam shakes his head. He shouldn’t cry in front of Wright and Len but he can’t help it. “Sasha was…just…Sasha. That was the way they were.”

            “That was your _mom_?”

            Sam nods.

            “But your mom was…did they have a dick?” Dean says, so clearly confused, so desperately trying to figure it out.

            Sam nods. “But they…they weren’t a man. Inside. They were Sasha. Everybody knew that.” He doesn’t know how to explain it. Sasha braiding their hair, swearing in Russian, smoking a stolen cigarette pinched between their forefinger and thumb. Sasha had always been there, as long as Sam could remember. Sam’s mom. _Don’t call me mom, call me mama. You are such an American boy. My little secret boy. Mal'chik sekretov_.

            “And he’s dead.”

            “They ran away,” Sam said “Then they were caught and they were terminated.” Sasha had always bitched about people who were stupid and then they ran. They left and Sam didn’t know what to do.

            “When was this?   What year?” Len asks.

            “I don’t know. I think I was eight,” Sam says.

            Dean pushes the cup of coffee in his hand. “Take a drink, Sammy.”

            Sam does, sipping the sweet and bitter brew. He closes his eyes. He realizes he’s rocking forward and back when Dean puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder.

            “It’s okay,” Dean says. “You’re okay.”

            “That can’t be Sasha,” Sam says and takes another sip. He’s only looking at Dean. He’s going to keep his eyes on Dean and pretend that it’s just Dean and him.  

            But Len says, “Are you sure?”

            Sam can only nod.

            “What happened?” Len says. “This was before the regs were reformed, right, they could—

            “They left them in the sun a day, because if they burned it made the skin come off easier and then they hung them upside down and cut all their skin off,” Sam says. They started with the face and then the back and chest and Sasha screamed. They would make long cuts and then rip the skin off. Sasha passed out a couple of times but they kept waking them up. “I wasn’t allowed to not look, we all had to watch. Remember. When they were done they cut them down just left them on the ground and Sasha kept saying they were cold. Then when it started to get dark they finally died and we were allowed to leave.” _Ya zamerz_ , I’m cold. That bloody, skinless face with Sasha’s eyes.

            “Jesus,” Dean says. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

            Len shakes his head. “It’s illegal now.”

            Wright doesn’t seem particularly fussed. “That raises the question, don’t it? If this Sasha person is dead, who the hell is that leaving?”

            Sam straightens up and tries to focus. “Is it a ghost?” he asks. Although he can’t imagine Sasha being like that.

            “I don’t think so,” Dean says. “Lets go talk to the person who saw them leave.” His hand on Sam’s arm is a comfort, a compass. He all but pulls Sam to his feet.

            Sam follows him and they are out the back storm door before Wright can haul himself to his feet.

            Dean stops Sam, hand still on his arm. “I’m pulling the plug on this,” Dean says. “This is fucked five ways from Sunday.”

            Sam is still reeling and can’t quite follow. Pull the plug on what?

            “I should never have gotten us into this,” Dean says. “We’ll talk to the chick who got beat up and then when we get back we’ll tell Len that we’re out of here. Tell him he can call the cops. No more slave shit. These people are worse than monsters.”

            Sam can hear Wright coming across the kitchen in heavy steps and doesn’t even know what to say.

            Dean hauls him towards the trailers and Sam just keeps up. The girl from the house, Rini, comes out of one of the trailers and watches them. Women come out from a couple of the trailers and a kid comes to the door but one of the women turns and says, “Git back inside.” The women all have close cropped hair--crewcuts.

            The kid disappears.

            “Rini?” Dean says.

            From behind them Wright says, “Go ahead Rini, these guys want to talk to Inna. It’s okay.”

            Rini nods and leads them to another trailer. It’s old and has rust streaks. There are weeds growing all around it and cardboard in a window with no glass. At Len’s, the women do what they can to decorate. HD’s room has a bed and an armchair and there are pictures cut out from a magazine and made into a sort of collage on one wall—forests and mountains and deer. Things aren’t great but they’re clean.

            There are three metal steps and Dean takes them in two steps. Inside they are in what would be the living room except there’s no furniture, just pallets. Sam counts five kids and two women. The place smells like diapers.

            “Who the hell are you?” There’s another woman standing the hallway but Sam’s eyes haven’t adjusted and there’s less light there than in this room.

            Rini whispers in the woman’s ear.

            “What do you want with Inna?” the woman asks.

            “We just want to talk to her,” Dean says. “I’m Dean. This is my brother, Sam. Len brought us over because the guy who killed one of you attacked someone over at Len’s.”

            “It wasn’t a guy,” says the woman.

            “I know,” says Dean. “I hunt things like it. Me and Sam.”

            The woman snorts. “How does a slave hunt things?”

            Her voice is southern. Educated sounding. It reminds Sam of New Orleans in some way. One of the kids starts to cry. One of the women gets up and picks up the toddler and croons, “Shhhh shhhh shhhh. June, Juney, June.”

            “I’m not a slave,” Dean says. “My brother is. I just found him a couple of months ago.”

            One of the women says, “You’ve got a barcode.” She’s pretty, even with her nearly shaved head.

            Dean says, “Fake. Look, your asshole of an owner is gonna get bored soon enough and want to check on us.”

            The woman in the hallway says, “Come on, then.”

            They follow her to the room in the back, across from the bathroom. The smell is worse here, ammonia and acrid. Sam’s eyes are watering. Or he’s still crying, he’s not sure which. He’d forgotten about the way Sasha had a little bit of widow’s peak. How much has he forgotten?

            In the back bedroom there’s a woman lying on blankets. The room is close but there’s light and Sam can see she’s been worked over. Her face is really swollen and bruised, one eye swollen shut, the eyelid purple, and stretched, and shining.

            “Inna,” says the woman from the hallway, the one with the southern accent. “Inna, there’s a couple of men here to talk to you about what happened.”

            Inna stirs. The woman with the southern accent is tall, only a hand’s breadth shorter than Sam. Her hair is so pale that she looks almost as if she doesn’t have eyelashes and eyebrows but something about her keeps bothering Sam.

            “Excuse me, ma’am, but did you ever work in New Orleans?” he asks.

            She looks up at him and her eyes are dark gray and distinctive. He’s sure he knows her. “What’s it to you?”

            “I feel like we’ve met. I used to be a pony boy at a club called Lagniappe.”

            “What’s your name again?” she asks.

            “Sam,” he says. “I was there seven, eight years ago.”

            She stands up. “Well didn’t you grow up.”

            “Do you know every fucking slave in the south?” Dean asks.

            “A lot of women in hospitality end up breeding,” she says. “Breeders want women who are pretty. And most stock is male. Just like most people in prison. I wasn’t at the club, Sam. It’s me, Rain. From Lanark.”

            Lanark. Where he grew up. Rain was four years older. She was tall and slim and had long golden hair and he thought she was the shit. Everyone did.

            “How did you end up here?” he says but even as he says it he knows the answer. Just because.

            She shrugs.

            “Rain?” Inna mumbles.

            “Hey baby,” Rain says.

            “What’s Lanark?” Dean asks.

            “It’s a breeder ranch in New Mexico,” Rain says. “We both grew up there.”

            “Did this chick know your mom?” Dean asks.

            “Sasha?” Rain asks. “Of course I knew Sasha. Everyone knew Sasha. I looked up to Sasha, they kept things going when Master Fakini couldn’t be bothered.”

            “That’s who Inna saw leaving, who beat her up,” Sam says. “I mean it looked like Sasha.”

            Rain frowns. “Sasha is dead.”

            “Wright has surveillance video,” Dean says. “Of the gate. Sam says the guy leaving looked like Sasha.”

            “He was even dressed like Sasha,” Sam says. “You know, the way Sasha used to make those dress-like things.”

            Dean shakes his head. “I can’t believe your mom was a dude.”

            “Non-binary,” Rain says. “Sasha wasn’t a _dude_.”

            Sam is grateful. Non-binary. There’s words for Sasha. Not the Russian ones that Sasha used for themselves which were all insults. Russian for _faggot_. If he thinks too much right now he won’t be able to help Dean. Won’t be useful on the hunt. He wishes he could see the thing that looks like Sasha and at the same time it makes him afraid.

            Inna has a broken arm that’s swollen so the skin is red and stretched; huge and hot to touch. Rain tells them Wright said if it didn’t get better he’d have someone out. He doesn’t like to spend the money, Rain says. Dean is getting grimmer and grimmer.

            “The guy who beat you up, did he have long hair?” Dean asks.

            “He had a braid,” Inna says through a broken mouth.

            Sam wonders if she’s pretty when she isn’t like this. He thinks she might be.

            “There was this stuff by the trailer where Carrie Pearl was,” Rain says. “It was weird.”

            “Powder? Like rotten eggs?” Dean asks.

            “Powder? No, it was slimy, like uncooked chicken skin or something.”

            “Show us,” Dean says.

            There’s nothing there now except a little slimy looking stuff, like Vaseline. Dean crouches and looks at it, then looks up at Sam. “What if when they change the way they look, they, like, what do snakes do?”

            “Molt?” Sam asks.

            “Yeah, what if they, like, molt?”

            “That’s gross,” Sam says.

            “I don’t think this is a siren,” Dean says. “I gotta call a guy.”

 

#

 

            Wright wants them to stay overnight and see if the thing comes back but Dean nixes the idea. “Where do you keep your aspirin or Tylenol or whatever?” he asks and stalks to the upstairs bathroom and comes back with a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol. He takes it to the trailer where Inna is, knocks on the door and gives it to one of the women inside.

            Wright stands at the back door of the farm house, watching him. “That stuff ain’t free,” he says.

            “You need to get some kind of slave doctor out here,” Dean says.

            “I’d like to. Inna is a good girl. But I ain’t a millionaire and my truck’s in the shop right now, needs a ring job, and I ain’t got that kind of cash.”

            Dean goes right up the steps and into Wright’s face. “How about I break your arm and you can see how it feels.” Sam can barely watch. He feels like Dean’s going to get walloped and he knows that Dean will beat the shit out of Wright if he touches Dean, which probably won’t go well for the stock once they leave.

But Wright must recognize that he’s on dangerous ground. He rolls his eyes and looks at Len who is studiously avoiding his gaze. “I guess I could sell one of the boys. William is eleven. He won’t bring much but should be enough to get her looked after.”

            “Maybe you should sell that motorcycle,” Dean says.

            “I can’t do that! I don’t have my truck! How am I supposed to get around!”

            “Isn’t there some kind of inspection for places like this?” Dean says.

            “The state regulates breeding,” Sam says. He’s surprised to hear himself say it and Len looks surprised, too.

            “Well, the state could get an anonymous tip to check things out,” Dean says, not taking his eyes off Wright.

            “State don’t care about a slave getting hurt,” Wright says.

            “I’m sure everything is just perfect in your lovely little farm,” Dean says. “I’m sure you won’t mind an inspection.”

            Wright’s face twists. “Shit. Len, you didn’t tell me these guys were do-gooders. Okay. I’ll put it on a credit card.”

            They stand around in the kitchen while Wright makes a call for someone to come out. Wright complains the whole time about this being a shoestring operation and how capital intensive breeding is and how he has to get the bred stock to fourteen to even think about making a profit.

            He doesn’t go with them back down to the gate.

            “Wright’s kind of old school,” Len says when they’re back in the Volvo. “But he’d have done something about the girl.”

            “Shut the fuck up,” Dean says.

 

#

 

            HD’s room is a little cluttered. She calls it the Shame Hole. She’s got bottles and some sort of project going. She’s convinced Len to let them start a garden. She explained that they could supplement the food situation, end up saving him some money. “Pole beans, half runners, bush beans, tomatoes, onions,” she ticks off on her fingers. “Zucchini grows like a weed around here. Watermelon, cucumber, maybe onions and eventually potatoes. If it works we could even open a farm stand. Eventually we could get some chickens. If we could grow vegetables and get our own eggs, then we could replace at least one of our daily meals with stuff from here. I don’t know shit about growing stuff but I can learn.”

            And it would taste better than stock chow. But she doesn’t say that and neither does Sam. Slaves never do things for themselves, only for their masters.

            Sam likes HD’s room. It’s been whitewashed and she has an old blue armchair and a bed. He likes the collage she’s made of nature scenes from magazines on the wall over the bed. He holds the Bean (he doesn’t even know the real name of HD’s little girl, everybody just calls her Bean). Bean is trying to stick her fingers in his ear and laughing every time he pulls away.

            Dean is up at the office on the phone. Sam told HD about Inna and how riled Dean got a Wright.

            “He’s not breed stock,” HD said. “He doesn’t act like you.”

            Sam knows that. Knows that breed stock is famously stupid and docile. Felon stock is problematic but has more initiative.

            “Dean doesn’t like when I work,” Sam says. “I could earn him money. Like your garden.”

            “Work how?” HD says.

            “Hospitality,” Sam says. “He was sick and I worked at a truck stop but he and his dad went ballistic.”

            “You’ve got a different dad than him? That explains why you don’t look alike.”

            Sam shakes his head. “John is my father, I just don’t know him, you know? He’s a scary dude.”

            “How did he find you?”

            “Won me in a poker game,” Sam says.

            HD laughs. “No shit?”

            “Didn’t even know I was Dean’s brother. He just wanted to fuck with the guy who owned me.”

            “That must be weird, having this family come out of nowhere.”

            “Yeah. And you might have noticed, Dean is a good looking dude.”

            “You banging?” HD asks.

            Sam’s not sure if she’s trying to get him going or if she’s serious. “Dean doesn’t even like it when I suck some other guy off.”

            “I’m not exactly pro-incest,” HD says. “But it’s not like you guys can get pregnant and neither of you is under age.”

            Sam can’t quite meet her eyes but he also can’t help smiling. “And have you seen the ass on that man?”

            “And those sexy bow legs,” HD says.

            Bean laughs. The baby is warm and a little damp.

            “You keep in touch,” Sam says. “If worst comes to worst, maybe I can get Dean and his dad to buy this little one.”

            “Slavery isn’t going to be legal that long,” she says.

            Sam doesn’t know. He can’t imagine slavery being made illegal. What would happen to the slaves? The owners? It would upset so much.

            “You know it’s only been legal since the late seventies.”

            He didn’t. In fact he’s sure that’s not true.

            “Slavery was abolished in the Civil War. You know about the Civil War?”

            Sam sort of does. “North and South?”

            HD holds out her arms and Bean reaches for her, so Sam hands her over.

            “Yeah, black people were slaves and then there was a war and black people were freed. But there was some bogus legal case, the Drummond Decision, or something, back in like 1840. It laid out that some people were _massa carnis_. So even though the Civil War freed everyone, once in awhile someone was still legally _massa carnis_. It was psychopaths and maybe people who committed treason. I mean, they didn’t call them psychopaths, they said that people could be so evil it was clear they didn’t have a soul. They didn’t used to do anything but put them in prison without parole. But then in the late seventies, under Gerald Ford, they changed the law and then in New York, they were all worried about crime so they started finding more people _massa carnis_. Then along came three strikes and now there’s us.”

            The idea that someone had decided there would be slavery is mind blowing. Sam tries to think about that. Thirty-five years ago, no slaves. Now, it was like there had always been slaves.

            Thirty-five years ago he couldn’t have been made a slave. Except he really was a slave. And he kind of knew he should be. He couldn’t explain why but there was something in him, something deeply wrong.

            HD snorted. “I went to a protest against slavery at UNLV. Now here I am.”

            “UNLV?”

            “University of Las Vegas. I went there for a year and a half and then a bunch of shit happened. I married this asshole who couldn’t keep a job and then I was in a car accident.” She raises her shirt and shows him a long scar under her rib cage. “There were all these bills and our car died and I lost my job and I made some stupid decisions. Got busted for soliciting sex, believe it or not.” She shrugs. “Really, if I’d known about being a dom, I’d have done it before I was a slave.”

            “Yeah?” Sam asks.

            “You ever do dom/sub?” she asks.

            “Nah. I was a pony boy and then I took care of this old guy with Parkinson’s and then when he had to go into a nursing home, I was at a massage parlor in New Orleans. Massage parlor is not exactly dom/sub territory. Not sure I’d be any good at it.”

            “I’m really a sub,” HD says. “But I like to be right. So I could do dom stuff. I’m good at knots.”

            “Sammy?” he hears. Dean is coming across the yard. HD is like Dean. She knows so much. Sam wants to just sit and listen to her talk. He stands up and ducks out, waving at Bean who is tugging on HD’s shirt to nurse.

            Dean cocks his head to have Sam follow. “Okay, I talked to a friend of mine,” he says. “A guy named Bobby Singer. He thinks the same thing I do, that this is a shapeshifter.”

            Sam nods. Got it. Shapeshifter. How do they kill it?

            “So he’s gonna see if he can find another hunter. I’m gonna tell Len we’re outta here.”

            “What?” Sam says.

            “I told you I’m gonna pull the plug on this one. It’s just too fucked up. The way these people act is nuts, like you’re a lawn mower or something that they might remember to put gas in. And then this shit with your mom-dude. It’s just going to fuck up your head and—”

            “We can’t leave,” Sam blurts out.

            “Oh yeah?” Dean says. “Watch me.”

            Sam opens his mouth but the only word he can think of is one he can’t say. No.

            Dean frowns. “What? You didn’t want to come here in the first place. And I gotta say, it’s been eye-opening. No wonder your head is a little fucked up. I mean, I knew about slavery but I didn’t _know_ about slavery, you know?”

            Sam can’t even think. “Sasha,” he says.

            “Yeah? Sam, that shit you said, about what happened. I…I don’t know what to say.”

            “No,” Sam says. “It can’t walk around pretending to be Sasha.” And he wants to see it but he’s not stupid enough to mention that.

            “Not our problem,” Dean says. “Our problem is that you’ve been programmed by these cocksuckers to let them walk all over you. That and these people are dicks.”

            “Dean,” says Sam. He doesn’t know how to ask so he just looks.

            Dean frowns. He starts to look Sam in the eye and Sam can hear the ‘no’ coming but then he shakes his head. “Fuck. Okay. Another day.”


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Dean finish a hunt and Sam learns to think about Dean in a new way thanks to HD.
> 
> * * *

            It’s evening. Sam collects his four stock food bars (everything is based on height and weight) and heads for their room. He feels like he has had enough. It’s been years since he talked to people this much and easy as it is to be with HD and the other stock he just wants to take a breather. Maybe catch an hour or two of sleep before Dean the hunting machine who NEVER sleeps decides what they need to do next. He wishes he could go as long as Dean without sleep. He wishes they were at a hotel and he could have a milkshake and a couple of beers and watch tv.

            He glances back. Dean is eating a bar, mouth full, grinning at something one of the kids says.

            “Sam?” Lily calls from around one of the buildings.

            He is really not up to Lily but he can’t ignore her. Another conversation about getting her pregnant. He doesn’t know what it is about Lily. He’s had sex with skeevy guys and it’s been fine but the idea of having sex with Lily just seems wrong. It would save her from a factory, at least for a decade or so, if she got pregnant but it would bring another child into slavery. Although if HD is right, slavery is on its way out.

            When he comes around the corner, Lily is standing there, fists clenched, ready for something. And behind her is another Lily who looks terrified. The other Lily mouths, ‘Sam’ and the angry Lily clocks him—

 

            --

 

            « _Мальчик_ _-_ _зайчик._ »

            _Little wild rabbit_.

            Sam says, «Саша». _Sasha_. And opens his eyes.

            Sasha crouches in front of him, braid thrown over one shoulder. They have such blue eyes. «Ты так вырос!» they say. «Ты все еще помнишь свой родной язык», they say. _You've grown so big!_ _You still remember your mother tongue._

            For the briefest of moments, Sam feels such relief. Then something…and he takes a deep breath and realizes.

            _You aren’t my mother_ , «Ты не моя мама».

            “Sam,” Sasha croons, in their oh so familiar husky smoker’s voice.

            Sam hovers a bit on the edge of unconsciousness. He feels confused and sick and he doesn’t know exactly what is going on but he knows something is wrong. This person, this Sasha, smells wrong. There is something a little like fingernail polish remover.

            «Ты воняешь», _you stink_ , Sam manages.

            “Slaves,” Not-Sasha says in English. “You notice so much, always so afraid.”

            This thing is speaking their secret language. It has no right to do that. This language, Sasha’s language, belongs to Sasha and Sam. It gives Sam a jolt of energy, a tiny flame of anger to nurse.

            Sam is sitting up, sitting against a wall and he’s going to throw up so he tries to twist to the side but he can’t and he throws up all over his front. It makes his head hurt. There are actually two blurry Sashas overlapping each other. Dean is going to be disappointed. Dean wouldn’t…Dean would do something. He has no idea what but he knows it. The faint fingernail polish remover smell is overwhelmed by the smell of sickness but Not-Sasha doesn’t seem to care.

            Sam has always been smart. Sasha told him that was what would keep him alive, so he should be smarter now. He tries to think. He can feel the pulse of pain throbbing in time to his heartbeat and everything feels really far away, like he’s watching from deep inside his head and his body is just doing things. His hands are tied behind him. His ankles are tied.

            Sasha. «Саша мертв». _Sasha's dead_ , Sam says.

            “Has been for a long time,” says Not-Sasha. “Rain remembers them. She is try to be like them. She thinks they were good at being head slave. Sasha Novak, electrician, no-gender, head slave. What a strange life. A failure, you know. Born a man, lives on the edge of society, dies a slave. What do you think, мальчик?”

            “I’m not your _boy_ ,” Sam says.

            This is a shapeshifter. It pretended to be Lily. It hit him, and he tried to hit back but it hit hard, harder than a person. His nose hurts and he hopes it’s not broken.

            “What did you do to Lily?” he asks.

            “Give her what she wants,” the thing that is not Sasha says and pumps its hips obscenely.

            “Don’t hurt her,” Sam says. “She can’t help it.” He can’t explain what she can’t help. Being Lily, he thinks. Goddamn it, get it together.

            “You like her?” Not-Sasha says, thoughtful. “I do not think so. I think, you are just not good at thinking about yourself. You think about yourself, мальчик. You are in big trouble.”

            “Why do you attack stock?” Sam says. He is trying to get his thoughts together, he needs time. Keep it talking.

            Not-Sasha laughs. “Like cartoon, eh? I talk and talk until you can finally surprise me. Except, I do not think you can surprise me. Why slaves? I like slaves like you. From the slave farms. Everything is so wonderful for you, the freedom, the taste of things. When I am one of you it is like so much joy. Felon slaves is like…getting out of prison. It is good, too. Not as good, but good, you know? That woman in Mississippi, she is like you. The one here, Denise, I think she is from a farm but she is a felon and she is so, what do you say, nothing. You know? So beaten in her head. You are precious, мальчик, I think I like to be you. But what is a thing like you doing, run with a hunter. Little rabbit, you will get eaten!”

            Sam tenses and turns his wrists tied behind him, and the rope cuts into them but he thinks maybe they are a smidgen looser. People always think he isn’t flexible because he’s so big. If Not-Sasha stops paying attention to him he might be able to get his arms and wrists under his feet and get them in front of him.

            If only he didn’t feel so sick. If only his head wasn’t pounding. If only his thoughts weren’t so scattered.

            “I wonder what Dean will be like,” Not-Sasha says. “You know I have to kill him. Hunters. And I will have to lie low.” Not-Sasha brushes Sam’s hair out of his eyes and Sam flinches. He gags on the edge of being sick again because it’s all so wrong.

            Dean will kill Not-Sasha the moment he sees it.

            Not-Sasha stands up. “He will be so happy to see you. I think maybe he is worried to not find you. After that, I come back here and I get Sasha back out of your head and I kill you.”

            Then its faces sags and melts like a wet burn. Things crack as its body lengthens and shudders and twists. Where does the extra mass come from? Or does it make itself less dense, like bird bones. How does its clothes change, are they part of its skin? It’s outermost layer sloughs off and the fingernail polish remover smell is really strong for a moment. The skin puddles and there are long gray hairs in it and bits of Not-Sasha’s clothes.

            Then Sam is looking at himself and it’s really weird because he doesn’t exactly look like that, not in the mirror. Dean will know, right?

            “He’s gonna be mad,” Not-Sam says. “He hates it when we ‘take off’ doesn’t he.” It rolls its shoulders back, stretches.

            Sam can’t help it. He gets sick again, bringing up strings of bile and saliva.

            Not-Sam laughs.

            Sam’s head is pounding and he sees spots but when his vision clears, Not-Sam is gone.

            He breathes through his nose for a moment. Then he slips off his scuffs and starts wiggling. He needs to get his wrists under his butt and past his feet. When his hands are in front of him, maybe he can use his teeth.

 

#

           

            It takes forever. Sam thinks maybe an hour but he’s pretty sure he’s got a concussion and, like being high, a concussion screws with his sense of time. When he’s high, sometimes he thinks a lot of time has passed but it’s only been a few minutes. Hopefully it’s like that.

            His wrists are bleeding by the time he gets his hands in front of him, long streaks of blood running down his fingers and then the other way, down his forearms. But when Not-Sasha tied him, it tied him with his wrists crossed. When he gets his wrists in front of him he can turn them so they’re narrower and he’s got some riggle room. Then he uses his teeth and slowly edges the rope up his hands. The rope won’t go past the widest part of his hands. It’s stuck, dug deep into skin and muscle.

            He’s so stupid. He tries, he really does but the rope isn’t budging.

            Dean is gonna get killed because he was too nice to a slave. To Sam.

            Sam might cry a little at that moment. His head aches and everything feels impossible.

            He yanks the rope back down around his wrists, scraping skin off and he’s so upset he doesn’t care. Then he works on getting just one hand out.

            It hurts like a mother but he does it. He gets his hands free. He fumbles with the rope around his ankles. It’s this bristly yellow nylon stuff and he can’t get the knot loose and he can’t break it. His fingers are bleeding from where he breaks nails when he finally gets it off.

            He gets up and his feet have gone numb and he staggers and falls to his hands and knees which makes his head feel as if there is a pressure building inside it with every beat of his heart. Pa-pain. _Pa-pain_. Pa-PAIN.

            He is probably too late. Dean is probably dead. They’ll kill him if Dean is dead and honestly, that’s okay. He could just stay here, maybe nobody will find him and he can just die.

            Get up. Get up. Get up.

            Sam does what he always does. He does what he thinks he’s supposed to do which in this case is rub pins and needles back into his feet and when he can, he stands up and puts his hand against the side of the building. It’s a shed that stands well away from everything else.

            He comes around the building. Find Dean. He realizes he forgot to put his scuffs back on and he’s barefoot but honestly, that’s the least of his worries. He’s not going back.

            He keeps breathing through his nose and he walks towards the back of one of the rows of slave quarters. Then around the side and past another and then finally, he sees the yard.

            He sees Lily (thank God) and then he sees other women. A kid sees him and stops and stares. Len is standing by the ranch, talking to a manager named Jesus.

            Then he sees Dean and himself. Not-himself. Not-Sam.

            Dean glances over and sees him and there is confusion. Not-Sam glances up and he is going to be too late because he knows Not-Sam is stronger than a human—except Dean has already gotten his arm around Not-Sam’s neck and Sam knows from sparring that Dean is incredible. But Not-Sam is strong.

            Time seems to slow down.

            Sam keeps walking forward. He wants to run but he can’t because his head, and because everything is moving faster than his thoughts can keep up with…

            Dean has something glinting in his hand, a knife, and he cuts Not-Sam’s jaw and Not-Sam screams like it burns—smoke wisps—and Dean pulls the knife across Not-Sam’s throat even as Not-Sam starts to crouch to throw Dean over its shoulder.

            Blood and smoke arc from Not-Sam’s throat. It spatters a woman. Not-Sam looks so surprised.

            But then death is apparently often a surprise.

            Lily screams. The blood-spattered woman screams.

            Sam goes to his knees and sinks back on his heels because his balance is bad and he’s afraid of falling.

            Dean yells, “Sam!” and lets go of Not-Sam and runs towards him.

            Not-Sam twists and shudders in the yard as everybody watches and blood spreads and runs on the hard-packed earth.

            Dean’s hands are on Sam and he can relax because Dean won’t let him fall over.

            “Sammy!” Dean says.

            “Dean,” Sam sighs.

            It’s over.

 

#

 

            Dean sits on the floor of the bedroom in Len’s place. Len says he left it as a bedroom in case he ever needed it but he never uses it. Sam is on the bed. He’s wearing his own clean t-shirt. Dean bitched him out for getting jumped but even has he did he was cleaning up Sam’s wrists and checking his nose, waving fingers in front of Sam’s face.

            “You’re like a mom,” Sam says.

            Dean gives him a death stare.

            “Like a kid gets hurt and then the mom is so scared she yells,” Sam says.

            The death glare intensifies but Sam is learning about Dean and it doesn’t scare him.

            Lily is sitting in the hallway rocking back and forth, humming a little. She won’t come in and if anyone comes near her she tenses up like she’s going to have an episode so everyone treats her as if she were electrified.

            HD stops in the doorway. “Can I get you anything?” she asks. She looks young and scared which isn’t how Sam thinks of her. But most people don’t see crazy shit like today. Hell, Sam has never seen crazy shit like today.

            Sam can’t imagine what she could get.

            “Something to take the Tylenol with,” Dean says.

            She brings back water.

            “Is he okay?”

            Dean nods. “Yeah. Concussed but I don’t think he was out long. Lily says a minute or two.”

            “What about…” Sam says.

            Dean waits.

            “It said it had sex with her. Can it get her pregnant?”

            HD looks even more upset. She clasps her hands together as if she is holding herself together.

            “Fuck if I know,” Dean says.

            HD glances out the door at Lily who doesn’t appear to be paying attention.

            “You need to sleep,” Dean says. “Rest is the only thing to do for a concussion.”

            So Sam does.

 

#

 

            Len lets them stay a few days.

            Inspectors show up while Sam is sleeping which is not the best time for an inspection. Dean has already burned the body of the shapeshifter. And the piles of skin they found. Sam doesn’t regret missing that.

            He doesn’t know what they told the inspectors to explain Sam sleeping in a bed but whatever it was, Len apparently passed fine.

            Sasha Novak. He never knew Sasha’s last name. He wonders if Novak should be his own last name. It doesn’t fit any better than Winchester, actually. He dreams of Sasha, fragments where Sasha is around but never turns to face Sam so that Sam can see his very blue eyes again. It’s a Slovak name. Dean has done a shit ton of work through the slave registry and tracked down Sasha’s records. They immigrated from the Soviet Ukraine, before the fall of the Soviet Union. They were indicted on check fraud and because they held a passport for a country that no longer existed and were from, not the post Soviet Russian but the Ukraine, another country now, it was easy for them to fall through the cracks.

            Sam finds computer screens give him a headache so he can’t research—even reading for more than a little bit bothers him but he takes the offered print outs and folds them. There’s a black and white photo like a driver’s license photo and in it Sasha’s hair is less gray.

            On their records, Sasha is marked ‘male’.

            “Did he want, like, a sex change operation?” Dean asks.

            “No,” Sam says. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think they felt like a man or a woman. Maybe some of both. Maybe they just felt like Sasha. I don’t know. I don’t remember talking about it. I was a kid.”

            “I sent the money to the lawyer,” Dean says. “You know, to get you emancipated.”

            Sam wants to say he should have kept it. The temporary barcode tattoo is fading already from the back of Dean’s hand. He’s wearing a gray Henley and a red plaid shirt and he looks like himself.

            “You suck as a slave,” Sam says.

            Dean wiggles his eyebrows. “I’m good at hospitality.”

            Sam laughs.

            The next day he walks around a little. Dean says no workouts for six weeks. He ends up at the door to HD’s room.

            “You’re up,” she observes.

            Before, he didn’t notice how shy she was behind her matter of fact demeanor. “How’s the Bean?” he asks.

            She shrugs. “Good.” She’s different around him now that he’s wearing jeans. It’s weird. He’s felt really lonely except for Dean and then when they got here, he realizes now that in some ways he felt as if he could relax.

            “How are you?” he asks.

            Dean would snort and say he’s not the person who got his head bashed in but HD just shrugs again and says, “Okay.”

            Sam thinks about asking if he could hold the Bean but decides against it. He wants to go back to the ease of slave to slave. Talking without pretending he is docile, stupid, not every having his own thoughts. He sees how much he does that. Slaves lie. All the time.

            If he thinks about it, he feels angry. So he doesn’t think about it.

            “I’ve been watching the way he looks at you,” HD says.

            Sam doesn’t ask who. “He won’t do anything but look.” He almost says that they did it once. But that’s too private. It burns in him that Dean has subtly, but clearly, rebuffed every approach since.

            “You know it’s really hard to tell who is a dom and who is a sub,” HD says.

            Sam cocks his head. “Yeah?”

            “Do you think Dean’s a dom?” she asks.

            “Yeah,” Sam says. Definitely. Dean is take charge.

            “You know why people are subs?” she says. “It’s because they’ve got this thing in them where they hate themselves. It’s a really powerful emotion, hate.” Bean is trying to stand so HD holds her so she can rest her feet on her mama’s thighs. Bean puts her feet down and then curls them up, puts them down again, sort of tries awkwardly to push. “Yes,” HD croons to the baby. “Yes they do!” She looks at Sam. “Powerful emotion can be sexual. A sub needs to surf all that emotion. Not let it overpower them, but to ride it. They learn to make a compartment and to dip into that to get off. It’s kind of healthy, actually. I used to cut but being a sub helped.”

            Sam listens.

            “I think Dean is a guy who doesn’t always like himself,” HD says.

            “Yeah,” Sam says. “John did a number on him. Dean wants to live up to his dad so much. I mean, I think his dad loves him, you know?”

            HD nods.

            “You think Dean needs a dom?”

            HD shrugs. “I don’t know.”

            “I don’t know how to be a dom—”

            From across the yard Sam hears Dean call, “Sam!”

            “In HD’s!” he calls back.

            Dean stops in the doorway. “Hey HD. Sam, don’t tire yourself out.”

            HD looks at Sam and something in that look is very significant. “Dean,” she says, “go get us a couple of cups of tea.”

            Dean looks as surprised as Sam is. The stock gets water and stock feed. That’s it. Unless HD gets her garden going that’s all they’re ever going to get.

            “You’re doing a sucky job of taking care of Sam,” she says. Her tone is even. She bends a little over the baby girl who wants down down down. “Get him a cup tea. Sugar. It will be good for him.”

            Dean wavers and then, to Sam’s surprise says, “Okay.”

            Sam watches him go.

            “That’s a start,” she says. “You don’t have to tie him up and flog him to be his dom, although eventually he might like that. I don’t know. You’ll have to figure out if he’s really a sub or not. But if you want to get this relationship off the ground and into the air, you might try it.”

            Sam doesn’t know what to say or think. HD doesn’t seem to expect anything. She puts Bean down on the bed and the baby rolls over and laughs.

            Dean comes back with two mugs. “I got herbal because I don’t think Sam needs caffeine,” he says. “I mean, he had coffee this morning but you know.”

            HD nods. “You did good,” she says.

            Sam can see Dean relax. Sam sips the sweet hot tea.

            HD takes a sip and closes her eyes. Sam wonders how long it has been since she tasted sugar.

            He starts to say, what did Len say? He starts to say, this is good, thank you. Dom, he thinks. “Good work,” he says instead, like he’s really in any position to judge.

            Dean smiles. “You like it, Sammy? We’ll get some when we’re on the road.”

            HD smiles with her eyes over the mug.

            “Okay,” Sam says. And then, “We will.”

            Dean grins.

            “Baby,” Hazel says and holds the mug for Bean to take a taste. Bean slurps and then her eyes open so wide. HD laughs. “Yes, that’s good, huh? Hey Dean, I used to be a dom. You ever done a scene?”

            For a moment, Dean looks a little startled and then he grins and shrugs. “I’m more of a pick up the cute waitress kind of guy.”

            “Boring,” HD says. “But hey, whatever gets you off, right?”

            Dean agrees and as they talk Sam watches Dean watch HD. He’s not sure exactly what’s going on. Is Dean thinking about it?

            Sam thinks he’s gonna have a lot to learn. But then again, maybe so does Dean. And if this will make Dean happier, then by God Sam will learn.

 

# # #

           

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Chiisana-Sukima for many discussions of consent and lack thereof. Special thanks to HazelDomain whose slave Au inspired this--although they are nothing alike and hers is much much sexier. There is a character in this who is inspired by a real life person--thank you Hazel for reviewing and approving of the use of your name and things like The Shame Hole.
> 
> * * *


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